~ Everyday Wisdom for Business Leaders

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Are you building employee ownership or employee execution?

Many CEOs whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with over the years have tended to struggle with a common issue—how to increase accountability and responsibility on their teams. As leaders, we often find it difficult to let go of the control we have on processes and projects that our employees are responsible for executing.

Letting go of this control; however, is critical to building a sense of ownership that employees need to feel fulfilled and accomplished in their careers. It is also key to increasing accountability and responsibility among your team. When you can let go of some control, you will find that you will benefit from improved accountability, responsibility, drive, and employee engagement.

To increase accountability and responsibility on your team, you must begin by establishing and building trust. You have to be able to trust your team to make good decisions and stay on-target, and your team has to be able to trust you to give them space to make decisions and—importantly—mistakes without fear of reprimand. This trust doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and it takes steps to nurture.

Define Clear Goals

The first step is to clearly define measurable goals. This provides your team the knowledge and confidence to make decisions and deploy tactics that they believe will take them to the goal.

It is a good idea to create these goals with your direct reports who can help anchor overall business goals to functional capabilities and expertise. Defining goals as a team also helps lay the foundation for building trust and creates buy-in among the team.

Your goals must define the Afters of your team’s hard work, giving everyone at every level a clear vision of what good and great results look like. Making sure these goals are measurable is a critical component to creating this vision of what achievement looks like.

Establish Responsible Roles

Increasing accountability and responsibility also requires an increased sense of ownership in the people or person executing the work. Clearly defining roles and related responsibilities helps to achieve.. It also helps improve productivity and quality by ensuring that nobody is duplicating efforts or, on the flip side, not getting accomplishing critical tasks because everyone thought someone else was responsible.

Perhaps most importantly, clearly establishing the responsible role for accomplishing a particular goal means that everyone knows exactly who is responsible for what and where dependencies exist. People aren’t taking over other people’s assignments and there can be no blame games as the deadline approaches if deliverables are not met. If more than one person is point, then no one owns.

Relocate Decision Making

Once you have defined the goals and established responsible roles with your team, try to push the decision making for how the goals will be achieved as close to where the work is being done. This provides your employees with their own sense of control and ownership of the project—and the outcome.

Your talent wants a sense of ownership in what they do. This is where they get a real sense of accomplishment and fulfillment. When you make decisions on their behalf, you also take away their energy for the project. Rather than being the passionate leader to accomplish something great, they instead revert to simply doing what they are told and going through the motions. This energy can only lead to mediocrity or loss of top talent, depending on the personality type of the person being controlled.

Record & Measure Progress

Letting go of control does not equal letting go of accountability and responsibility—as we have been discussing, it is quite the opposite. Leaders may feel apprehensive to let go of control and let their team members drive ownership because they do not have the proper systems in place to measure progress and success.

You and your direct reports must establish a set of milestones and check-in meetings or reports to ensure forward progress. Without this, trust can easily begin to break down among the team, particularly in cases of longer-term projects or goals.

This is also why establishing clear, measurable goals is so critical to increasing accountability and responsibility on your team. You do not want to arrive at a project deadline, or at the end of the year when you are sitting down for a performance review, and find out that important project and organizational goals were not being met. If there are performance surprises, you have not done your job properly. Or, perhaps worse, your team thought they were successfully working toward a goal that was not agreed upon. They feel their hard work was not valued.

Recognize Progress

What gets recognized gets repeated. If you want to increase accountability and responsibility on your team, you must recognize people when they are doing a great job. This doesn’t mean a simple pat on the back and a generic “good job” every now and then.

While verbal and written recognition is always nice, it will only go so far for your really high achievers. The mistake that many leaders make in the recognition step is the assumption that verbal and written communication are enough. They may undervalue the fact that their high-achievers are often taking on far more work than their average or low-performers.

Your high-achievers are often the people that others go to with questions or for advice, they are picking up loose ends, and they are filling team skills gaps to keep initiatives moving forward. They are the personification of the phrase, “If you need to get something done, give it to a busy person.”

Keep in mind that you need to not just recognize, but also reward, the impact your high-achievers are having on your company. Not only are they contributing to the achievement of goals and creating financial impact, but they are also modelling the way for others on your team and helping to create a culture of excellence. Make sure you are taking the time to understand the person you are wanting to reward and rewarding them accordingly. While some people may value monetary rewards, others may value non-monetary rewards such as more time off or a particular experience. The more personal you can make your recognition and reward, the more effective you will be at influencing future excellence.

This is not an impossible endeavour. While it will take work, and there will be mistakes made, the long-term impact of developing a more accountable and responsible workforce that is engaged and driven to achieve your vision is well worth the effort.

Over my career, I have long been viewed as someone who can drive transformational change and innovation in organizations. I did this as a VP for a large fortune 500 company and as a coach and consultant for over 100 CEOs and key executives. When I took on the role of CEO for Crestcom, the path forward for the company was very clear to me. Looking back on the past two years of being a CEO, I’ve learned some very important lessons about innovation from a CEO’s perspective that I did not fully consider in the beginning.

1. Innovation must involve everyone

There are two general schools of thought when it comes to organizational innovation: 1) create an innovation sub-group that is more focused on innovation than operations, typically out of about 10% of employees. 2) involve and engage everyone in innovation.

I have worked with both, and I now strongly believe in the latter. The main reason being that the people who are responsible for the operational roles assigned to them are truly the best people to innovated their own processes. I have found that encouraging and developing people to think innovatively is far more effective than trying to get innovative thinkers to understand operational processes to such a degree that they can make logical contributions to innovative improvements. This team is solving a problem for a reason- they are the ones who feel the pain of the problem. This does put more pressure on the CEO and managers to fill the role of the coach, particularly if the culture has long been one of complacency. It is not always the easiest or fastest route, but it is the most effective. Specific roles on the team must be assigned such as disrupter, researcher, facilitator, and project manager to ensure the team is bringing in new ideas and making progress. I think one thing that CEOs tend to overlook is that innovative thinkers don’t necessarily need to have the technological know-how to bring their ideas to life. They just have to be able to think in terms of process improvement and critical problem-solving. Once the idea has been born, then you can bring in a group of people to help make the project a reality. The key element is ownership. This team owns the idea and they will ensure it is successful.

This also provides everyone in the company the opportunity to grow both personally and professionally. Encouraging employees at every level to think critically to overcome challenges and seize new opportunities provides each individual the opportunity to grow, to learn, and to feel that unique sense of pride when they see something they have created come to life and succeed. It also serves to infuse innovation in your company culture, motivating everyone to innovate more and engaging your workforce in creating more opportunities for themselves as well as your organization. The overall result is a more engaged, satisfied, and productive team working toward driving greater results for the company.

2. Innovation requires change management

I thought I knew a thing or two about change management. After all, I’d spent years working on strategic planning, start-ups, transformational leadership and the like. But the role of the change manager as a CEO is very different from how I had experienced it before, both in previous roles as an executive and an outside consultant.

As Harry Truman so famously liked to point out: The buck stops here.

When you are the CEO, you are ultimately responsible for the result and consequences of all of those decisions. Particularly when the consequences are bad. Leaders can delegate tasks, but they cannot delegate responsibility.

You also have many, many… MANY more stakeholders to work with as the CEO. This presents both wonderful opportunities, as well as great challenges. I have always been a believer in the power of shared experiences and gaining different perspectives. It becomes more difficult when you have so many conflicting variables and opinions that it is tempting to take the easier (short term) route and stop moving forward. It is important to remember that it is simply impossible to please everyone. You must make decisions based on the best information you have available and move forward.

Everyone talks about communication and trust when they talk about change management. These are so important for all leaders and managers to continually build and improve on. When you are the CEO, you have to walk a fine line between what you should communicate, particularly in tough financial times. Building the trust and credibility to make your communications effective takes time, and sometimes hard work. Breaking it takes almost no time at all! Throughout it all, always remember to stay true to your core values, remain trustworthy, and be open in your communication to nurture a culture in which change management can be effective.

3. Not all great innovations are big

When many of us think about innovation, we think about Steve Jobs and the iPhone, or Elon Musk and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. We don’t usually think about all the little innovations that happen every day that make our lives just a little easier, or work just a bit more efficient.

Some, if not most, people in your organization are making these little innovations every day. Or they are learning from others’ innovations and applying them to your company’s processes and operations. This type of innovative thinking is, in many ways, far more important to the success of your business than holding out for that one big one. Think about how you can recognize and reward even the little innovations that happen on your team, and how you can encourage these to be shared so that everyone can benefit from them.

What is a small innovation in your team you can recognize today?

4. Innovation is key to growth

They say that creativity is thought and innovation is action. There are many leaders in the world that have great ideas but cannot seem to bring those ideas to life.

When I became CEO of Crestcom, the leadership team had done very little for years to innovate processes, programs, or products to stay ahead of market and industry trends. Given our competitive and innovative industry, we had to move fast to execute key changes to our curriculum and technology. We have succeeded in meeting and exceeding many of our growth strategy milestones. We have accomplished this through innovative thinking, hard work, many hours and lots of coffee, and (sometimes) by sheer will. When I look back at all that we have accomplished so far, it fills me with a great sense of pride in my team and in the whole Crestcom community for how we have pulled together to effect some significant changes.

If you need to grow your business, you need to be able to model innovation as a CEO. You must role model vulnerability, self-awareness, urgency and have a calming attitude of we will solve this together when something does not go right. You have to work alongside your team, taking the risks and the challenges of innovation right along with them. Without it, your company is doomed to resign itself to the slow decline of mediocrity.

A negotiation model that will help you stay focused on creating value for your business through closing successful negotiations.

In The New, New Thing, Michael Lewis refers to the phrase business model as “a term of art.” Some businesses have a clear business model and many, less successful ones, do not. Business models help leaders tell the story of how their business works, how it will make money and add value. There are other types of models that we use in business, though they serve the same basic purpose. A negotiation model, for example, is used to tell the story of how to plan and execute a successful negotiation process. A negotiation model provides a high-level view of how negotiations work and steps that need to be taken to optimize the negotiation process to ensure desired outcomes and foster mutually beneficial relationships.

You are negotiating every day. But how often do you take the time to plan, to model your negotiation approach to ensure you have a successful outcome? Great business negotiators have a unique ability to make or save their organization a great deal of money. It is their value proposition. Even the most experienced and skilled negotiator understands the importance of using a negotiation model to guide them through the negotiation process and successfully close a deal. This model is second nature to practiced negotiators who appear more casual and conversational. With practice, you can make this negotiation model work for you as well, moving through the process as a matter of habit.

Years ago, in my previous life as the VP of Information Technology for a large manufacturing company, I found myself in the position to negotiate a deal with an impact of $30 Million in savings. This is the negotiation model I used then, and still use today:

Negotiation Model Step #1: Prepare

Knowing what you want out of the deal is a crucial first step that many negotiators overlook. Clearly defining what you need, and why you are entering into a relationship with the other party is an important first step. Without this step, your risk is high that you will be entering into an agreement that does not satisfy your needs.

Preparing for the negotiation with this potential vendor, I identified what my needs were and my best-case scenario. I carefully prepared my approach and my language and aligned with my team. We were all clear on our roles in the meetings.

Negotiation Model Step #2: Know

Successful negotiations require research into the other company, their needs and capabilities, their team members, etc. This research can be done in a variety of ways and you should employ as many different research channels as possible. While working on this vendor negotiation, we went through almost a year of due diligence to prepare our support approach, service level agreements, and relationship building with the team who would ultimately be our support team. This research included a series of discovery meetings in which we both communicated what our key needs were and the areas that were most important to both of us. These meetings helped build a strong working relationship that was key to enabling the actual negotiation to go smoothly.

Negotiation Model Step #3: Create

In almost any negotiation situation, concessions and alternatives need to be made to create a win-win scenario that builds the relationship. In this step of the negotiation model, create as many alternatives to your best-case scenario outcome that you defined in step #1.

Using your knowledge of the other party that you have gathered from step #2, brainstorm and map out as many possible alternative scenarios. Think in terms of, “If this piece of the agreement doesn’t go exactly the way I want it, what are the possible alternatives or reasons the other party might bring forward?”

During this step, I developed 3 BANTAs (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement), and I formed clarity on potential areas of concession; if I gave on this, I would want that.

Get creative on how you will address each of these routes and what alternatives you can present. This step helps you stay in control of the negotiation process, even as it shifts and takes alternate turns. You are never surprised, because you have already modeled the potential moves.

Negotiation Model Step #4: Give & Get

This is the step of the negotiation model that represents the actual negotiation event. Even the most experienced and skilled negotiator prepares to give and get concessions to create a valuable, win-win scenario. It is a common misconception that, in every negotiation, one side must win and the other side must lose.

When you think about the negotiations that you have participated in, how many have been with another party that you will never have to work with again? Particularly in your professional life, that answer is likely very few. We negotiate with current and potential clients, vendors, and employees and colleagues on an almost daily basis. Your goal in these negotiations is to create value for your business while building the relationship with the other party. A hardline approach to the negotiation is rarely the correct answer for achieving this goal. Here are a few negotiation tactics to incorporate during the Give & Get Step:

Be patient: Many people dislike negotiating so much that they would rather simply take what is offered to them and end the conversation. This is a mistake. There is always room to negotiate, and having the patience to stick with it can produce a better deal for you and your business. This is an opportunity for you to create real, tangible value for your company. Don’t throw it away!

Use an agent of higher authority: Always have a “higher authority” that you have to report to if specific aspects of the negotiation are not going the way you would like them to go. Many people confuse authority with power, thinking that they have power in a negotiation if they have the ultimate authority to make final decisions. In reality, it is often the opposite. Your authority can be used against you! In my case, I employed this negotiation tactic by communicating that I did not have the authority to go over a specified amount, I simply was not allowed to.

Don’t get stuck in the weeds: While patience is a virtue in negotiation, don’t get that confused with digging your heels in and getting stuck in the weeds. Negotiation is a give and get process, where both sides need to understand each other’s needs and come up with creative solutions to creating a win-win scenario. If you are stuck in one area, try to get creative to find other solutions that mitigate this sticking point. Or, agree to “parking lot” it for later discussion and move on.

Show respect and use emotional intelligence: Again, in most negotiations, building the relationship is an important part of the overall goal. Build the relationship by being professional and respectful at all times, even if the conversation is getting heated and emotional. Using emotional intelligence goes a long way in negotiations. EI will help you recognize and empathize with the other party, while managing your own emotional reactions. Ensure you are asking the right questions.

Don’t negotiate when you are tired: It is so much easier to be patient, to be creative, and to manage your emotions and the negotiation conversation when you are well-rested. Don’t go into an important negotiation tired. If possible, schedule negotiations with enough time after traveling or other big events to feel well-rested. If you are travelling to a big negotiation, particularly if you are travelling a long distance, arrive a day or two ahead of the meeting to give yourself time to recover from jet lag and become a bit more comfortable with your surroundings.

Negotiation Model Step #5: Conclude

You might be surprised by the number of times people leave a negotiation without concluding on a standard, written set of agreements. Always make sure that the terms of the agreement are clearly communicated, written if possible, and agreed to by both parties before leaving the negotiation.

At the conclusion of our negotiation, I was able to successfully close a 7 year $300 Million global outsourcing agreement that resulted in over $30 Million in savings for the organization. This impact on the business created real, tangible value that helped us continue working toward achieving our overall growth goals.

You may have noticed that ⅗ of my negotiation model are focused on preparation before the negotiation takes place. This is because preparation is the ultimate key to successful negotiations. You cannot properly use common negotiation tactics and tips if you have not prepared yourself with goals, knowledge, and information that those tactics rely on. Successful negotiation does not work with quick tricks. It requires preparation, clarity, and commitment to goals to create real, bottom-line value for your business.

Tammy Berberick is the President and CEO of Crestcom International, a worldwide interactive leadership development and sales training organization operating in over 60 countries.

What is more important than your mission and vision? Your leadership purpose.

I have been reflecting on purpose lately. What is purpose? What is Crestcom’s purpose? What is my purpose?

Purpose is our directional magnet and life fuel. It is a scale, a life balance, requiring hard work and challenge. It is reward and fullness as we achieve steps toward fulfilling our purpose. It is aspirational, and it is frustrating. And it is worthiness. To have our passions become our purpose and our profession is Nirvana.

What is Your Leadership Purpose?

Harvard Business Review defines leadership purpose as “Who you are and what makes you distinctive… It’s not what you do, it’s how you do your job and why—the strengths and passions you bring to the table no matter where you’re seated.”

Many leaders get so wrapped up in the organization’s purpose that we don’t think about defining our own leadership purpose. As a result, we can fall into a trap of working hard and putting in many hours while feeling unfulfilled in what we do.

Your leadership purpose is also the thing that pulls you and, by extension, your team through tough times. It acts as your due north that will keep you oriented through the chaos and distractions so that you can enjoy the journey. Communicating your leadership purpose, along with your organization’s purpose, to your team helps them understand the why of your leadership style and puts their own tasks and goals into perspective. Perhaps it will also make them think about their own purpose and how it aligns with your organization’s purpose.

Defining your own leadership purpose is not always easy. It will begin with a broad idea, which you can then distill down to a targeted, impactful leadership purpose statement.

Step 1: What are your personal values?

What is it that you are truly passionate about? What would you do with your time if money was not a factor? Some people like to think of this as what they were passionate about when they were young, before adulthood took over their life. This may or may not apply to you, but your values have typically been with you from a young age. It’s not just about what you wanted to do with your life or what you “wanted to be when you grew up”, but what you have always been interested in and passion about.

Step 2: What do you want to accomplish in your life?

Think about the impact that you want to make in your life. This does not have to be grandiose. There is nothing wrong with valuing time and connection with your family over something like landing humans safely on Mars. This is YOUR purpose. It needs to define what you want to accomplish in your life.

Step 3: Write it all down

This is potentially the easiest step. Don’t think about whether your ideas are defined well enough. Certainly don’t worry about spelling and grammar. Just get your thoughts out of your head on onto paper (or on the screen). Don’t just stop after a minute or two when you can’t think of anything else to write. Give yourself at least 20 minutes and really push yourself to explore your values and aspirations deeply.

Writers call this free writing and it is a great exercise to help you further develop your thoughts and ideas so you can start formalizing your leadership purpose statement.

Step 4: Refine your leadership purpose statement

This is potentially the most difficult step! Depending on how you operate, this step may be best done directly after you have completed your free writing exercise and you are still in the mindframe, or perhaps leave it and come back to it the next day when you’re a bit more fresh.

In this step, you need to distill and refine your leadership purpose statement down to just one sentence. It needs to be simple, clear, and action-oriented. Perhaps most importantly, it needs to define you as a person and as a leader.

Step 5: Share it

Once you have completed your leadership purpose statement, share it with friends, family, and colleagues who know you best and whose opinions you respect. Ask them to provide you with their thoughts and feedback. From their perspective, does this statement really define you as a person?

Again, this is YOUR leadership purpose, so don’t feel like you need to take all of their comments and suggestions into account if you feel like they do not align with your purpose. But it is a helpful exercise to help see your style from other’s perspectives—do they see this statement as defining how you lead?

You may or may not decide to make adjustments to your leadership purpose statement after this step.

Step 6: Put your leadership purpose in action

What is the point of this exercise? Certainly not to write a statement and then pin it to your wall or keep it in your desk. You need to put it in action and live it—to fulfill it.

Your Leadership Purpose in Action

Your leadership purpose will manifest itself in different ways depending on what your purpose is. My leadership purpose has led me to become the CEO of Crestcom, an international leadership development organization. I am passionate about growing better leaders around the world. This inspired me to update Crestcom’s purpose statement: Make the world a better place by developing stronger, more ethical leaders across the globe.

When I am talking with our clients and hear how their leadership development experiences have changed their personal and professional lives—and have made an impact on the organizations they lead—I feel truly fulfilled. No matter how stressed or tired I may feel, it fills my cup knowing that my leadership purpose and Crestcom’s purpose are being fulfilled as well.

I recently traveled to participate in the graduation of Trinidad and Tobago’s Police Service from our leadership development program. The graduates had learned so much from the program, from realizing that they are truly a customer service organization and developing their vision around that, to learning how to communicate and negotiate better, and improve their business acumen skills which improved processes and reduced wasted time and money. Everyone who graduated had the opportunity to speak in front of the group and discuss how their leadership training had improved their lives.

The impact of this experience grounded me back in my leadership purpose and Crestcom’s purpose. It got me to thinking, what would our world really be like if all leaders were more ethical, empathetic, communicative, and passionate?

“Any business that isn’t thinking along these [customer lifetime value] lines is simply playing the wrong game. Granted, it’s not always easy to think this way; it’s only natural to push back from time to time when you feel a customer is asking for too much. For that reason, it’s critical to constantly remind yourself, and your team, that you are striving to capture the customer’s lifetime value. This helps put the little things into perspective.”

Isn’t it true that all the little things tend to pile up and, ultimately, become the thing that puts us over the edge? Suddenly, you find yourself in a defensive argument with a customer over a small issue that, in the grand scheme of things, makes little difference to the bottom line of your business.

Customer Lifetime Value puts the value of each of your customers into perspective, allowing you to put yourself in the mindset to start putting real customer service strategy in place. That perspective helps you and your team diffuse dissatisfied customers, rather than allow customer service situations to get out of hand.

What’s the first thing you do in the morning?

Many of us are familiar with Stephen Covey’s “Big Rocks” illustration. When we spend our time on the easy and unimportant little things (the small rocks), we run out of time for our most important priorities (the big rocks). To accommodate this time misallocation, we make tradeoffs in our relationships and our health.

It used to be that, as soon as I awoke, I would immediately check my emails. One email led to another, and soon it was time to leave for work. I had not accomplished my key priority nor done any exercise that morning. I would get into my car, feeling unorganized and a little down.

Today, I don’t start my day with trivial things. Here’s my new approach to time management:

4:30 a.m. Frog Eating: There is an old saying about eating frogs: If you have to eat 3 frogs, don’t spend a lot of time looking at them, and don’t start with the smallest one. Eat the biggest one first. When I wake up, I get dressed in my workout clothes first thing, and then I tackle my most important task from 4:30 a.m. – 6:30 a.m. Once accomplished, I reward myself with exercise and my healthy shake.

Teddy knows a thing or two about eating frogs.

Follow the Schedule: To make sure I’m focused on my big rocks, my goal is to accomplish everything on my schedule for that particular day. I know that if I do not accomplish what I have scheduled for that day, it will have to be moved to the next day. By following my schedule, I generate personal energy instead of exhaustion. I feel that I am in control of my schedule, rather than a schedule victim.

Evening Brain Release: Before I go to bed every night I review my schedule for the next day and ensure I have everything planned and noted—this is key and if I skip this step I cannot sleep well. My brain will worry that I may forget something and it processes all night. I need this brain release.

Weekend Review & Planning: I review my schedule for the upcoming week and I schedule everything on my calendar. Not just my meetings, but also exercise, reading, writing, preparation time, get-togethers with friends.

Document & Schedule the Tasks: I document all of my tasks on my Google tasks list and attach a due date to each. These all appear on my calendar so I can adequately schedule work time to complete them. Tasks are blue and my meetings are green on my schedule.

Focusing on my big rocks and eating frog at 4:30 in the morning has changed my productivity and my attitude. And that’s no bull!

About Tammy Berberick

As Crestcom’s CEO and President, Tammy is an accomplished leader with a track record of developing and leading transformational change within organizations.

Crestcom International, LLC is an international leadership training organization that focuses on growth. Crestcom partners with organizations to facilitate leadership growth, which results in real, bottom-line business growth.

Tammy received her undergraduate degree and MBA from the University of Denver. She also practiced as a CPA in Colorado. Tammy has served on several boards including, Florence Crittenton Services of Colorado, Women’s Vision Foundation, and the Girls Scouts. She is a past recipient of the Denver Foundation’s Minoru Yasui Community Volunteer of the Year Award, Colorado Women’s Leadership Coalition’s “Women Leaders of Excellence Award” and was previously named one of the “Top 50 Working Hispanic Women in the Nation” by Hispanic Business magazine.